Modern Iraqi Poetry: A brief introduction
| A young poet called Badr
Shakir al-Sayyab from Jaikur, a tiny village not very far from Basra in
the south of Iraq, in 1947, when he was still a student at the College
of Education in Baghdad, published a poem under the title "Was it
Love? There was nothing uncharacteristic or new in the way of dealing with
the subject. It was like many other Arabic poems of that time, even naïve,
with a touch of romanticism and sentimentalism, yet it broke down the conventional
boundaries of Arabic poetry, whose rhymes and rhythms stretched back more
than 1600 years, and unburdened it from the chains of traditional metre.
This was a revolutionary step towards what is called in the Arab
world "free verse", one that changed the direction of twentieth-century
Arabic poetry and the ways in which Arab poets were to think and act in
relation to their time.
With the end of the Second World War and defeat of fascism, there began also in Iraq a period that was dominated by new democratic aspirations and the need to move towards new horizons. The change in poetic form was an indication of the response by Iraqi and other Arab poets to the new political and social circumstances. A new humanist spirit emerged among Iraqi intellectuals: they wanted not only to change everything but also to live in their time - and to do that they had to be modern. Al-Sayyab, Nazik al-Malaika, Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, who were considered to be the pioneers of the first wave, confessed that the reading of modern western, and above all, English poetry, led them to their new experiments in writing poetry. We can recognise easily the influences of poets such as T S Eliot and Edith Sitwell on al-Sayyab, and Keats and Shelley on al-Malaika. But this was not only the first step in the transformation of modern Iraqi poetry. Their main achievement manifests itself in their heroic battle against the old forms and traditions of Arabic poetry that opened all the closed doors enabling the next generations to continue their work. The second wave of innovation in Iraqi poetry took place in the 1960s and was more radical and experimental. The poets of this generation wanted not only to renew Arabic poetry but also to be with their works, a creative part within modern world poetry. And to go further and deeper into the forest, they experienced everything from Dadaism and Surrealism to visual and typographic forms, and tried to explore new language. The poets represented here belong to these two
main streams in modern Iraqi poetry: the pioneers and the modernists. Finally,
if there is something to be said about this poetry it is that Iraqi poetry
was and still is the creative source for the whole of modern Arabic poetry.
Back to Contents |
|||
|
Copyright remains with contributors. All rights are reserved.
|